Localization Institute Global ToolBox – Monterey 2024Brendan Keating2024-10-29T02:19:21+00:00

The Localization Institute is excited to offer several interactive seminars and round tables as part of the upcoming Global Toolbox Day at LocWorld52 in Monterey, California on Monday October 28 2024. As a co-organizer of LocWorld Conference, the Localization Institute offers these seminars and round tables as separate, stand-alone events. You do not need to be registered for LocWorld52 Conference in order to sign up for these offerings. If you would like to register for the main conference of LocWorld52, please visit the LocWorld website.

Please Note:  Global Toolbox sessions have size limits that cannot be exceeded – register now to reserve your seat!

Full Day Sessions – Lunch Included

Bigger, Better, Faster Round Table: Real-Life AI Adventures: From Imagination to Integration

October 28 from 9:00am – 5:00pm

Registration Fee: $650 – full day price (lunch included)

Your registration for this session includes lunch.

10% discount for 3 or more students from the same company – please contact jill@localizationinstitute.com for more information.

Session Description:

Join us for an engaging workshop exploring the dynamic intersection of AI and human expertise in localization and translation. Dive into real-life use cases of prompt engineering and the integration of AI within tech stacks, emphasizing the human element. Compare AI strategies for startups, scaleups, and enterprises, highlighting real-life use cases in localization workflows. Discuss how enterprises are maintaining human relevance alongside AI advancements, and tackling challenges like legal frameworks, tech integration, risk management, and internal pushback. Engage in our “Imagine the Future” session to creatively envision upcoming trends. This workshop offers insights and strategies to harmonize AI innovation with human-centered approaches.

Agenda:

The round table will be comprised of four sections, each led by a moderator:
  • Intersection of AI and human expertise
  • AI integration with localization tech stacks
  • Organizational aspects and risk management
  • “Imagine the Future” session

Key Takeaways:

Attendees will learn about real life use cases of how enterprises integrate AI into localization workflows, balance it with human expertise, and navigate organizational aspects.


Target Audience
: Everyone

Attendee Experience Level: Beginner to advanced

Round Table Organizers:

  • Daniel Goldschmidt
  • Oleksandr Pysaryuk (GitLab)

Advisory Board Members:

  • Antoine Rey, Argos Multilingual
  • Christiane Bark, Localization Consultant

Speakers:

  • Maria Paez Playa, Meta
  • Aki Ito, LocalizationGuy GK
  • Katell Jentreau, Expedia Group

Location:

Middlebury Institute of International Studies
460 Pierce Street
Monterey, CA

Maximum number: 25

Minimum number: 10

Please note:

The Round Table’s success depends on people being willing to share information and experiences freely. To encourage that, we ask the attendees not to record or republish the session. No formal minutes or records are kept, but attendees are free to keep their own notes.

Localization Institute Global ToolBox – Malmö 2023

Daniel Goldschmidt – Collaborator – LocWorld. Daniel is a consultant in software internalization and localization. Prior to that, he served as a senior internationalization project manager at Microsoft in the Cloud and Enterprise Division and led the internationalization team. Before joining Microsoft, Daniel cofounded RIGI Localization Solutions, a venture in the domain of visual localization, and he served as a senior software engineer for the Google internationalization team. He serves as vice-chair of the LocWorld program committee and as a member of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference review committee. Daniel presents frequently at international events. He holds a BS in computer science and mathematics (cum laude) and an MS in computer science, both from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Localization Institute Global ToolBox – Malmö 2023

Oleksandr Pysaryuk – Senior Localization Operation Lead – GitLab. Oleksandr is a localization leader with experience in building and growing successful teams and disciplines focused on internationalization software development, localization and internationalization technical program management, and global product management in sports technology, telecommunications, consumer technology, human capital management, ecommerce and engineering organizations.

Antoine Rey – SVP, Customer Development – Argos Multilingual. Antoine Rey started his career in localization in 1997 and has held various technical, sales, and management roles in the industry. His main area of focus is to consult, develop, and implement mature operational and business globalization models with clients across various industries. Antoine is a French native and holds a MS in information technology and a BA in international business and communications. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Christiane Bark –Localization Consultant. Christiane Bark discovered her passion for localization as a volunteer translator for Plan International and decided to make a career of it. She holds a diploma in translation and has worked in both freelance and in-house roles. Formerly a lead localization manager at Busuu, Christiane took over the content team and implemented a new localization process, bringing the quality of both the source content and translated copy to a whole new level.

Maria Paez Playa – Director, Localization Program Management – Meta. Maria Paez Playa is the head of localization program management at Meta. Her team drives localization strategy at scale for Meta’s diverse suite of products. Maria started in the localization industry ten years ago as a linguist and found her passion for program management at Snapchat where she founded and grew the localization team.


Aki Ito – President – LocalizationGuy GK. A native of Japan, Aki Ito is an experienced localization professional who has worked in the industry since 1996 in sales, operation management, and consulting. Aki has served as a member and chair of the board of directors of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) as well as a member of the editorial board for MultiLingual Magazine. He served as the team interpreter for the Colorado Rockies in 2000. He currently serves on the technical communication advisory board for the University of Minnesota and the advisory board for EDUinLOC. Prior to his involvement in the localization industry, Aki was an account executive at Dell in the United States and Japan, selling personal computers and networking solutions to multinational companies for their worldwide implementations. Aki has an MBA in international marketing and a BA in international relations

Katell Jentreau – Sr. Director of Localization – Expedia Group. Katell Jentreau has 20+ years of experience in localization, both on the vendor and client sides. She led the globalization effort at Box from 2012 to late 2015, before joining Netflix’s Globalization team as the company was getting ready to launch globally. From 2013 to 2015, she was also on the board of Women in Localization.

Multilingual AI Round Table: Integrated AI – Deep Learning and Beyond

October 28 from 9:00am – 5:00pm

Registration Fee: $750 – full day price (lunch included).

Your registration for this session includes lunch

10% discount for 3 or more students from the same company – please contact jill@localizationinstitute.com for more information.

Event description: Integrated AI – Deep Learning and Beyond

In recent years, the multilingual communication industry has witnessed remarkable achievements in human-level artificial intelligence. By training neural networks on large datasets, deep learning (e.g. genAI) has undeniably become the most impactful approach. To appropriately apply and manage AI at the enterprise level, constructive criticism such as data efficiency, generalization power, and interpretability, must be addressed. Significantly, this criticism aligns with the strengths of symbolic AI, which works by carrying out a series of logic-like reasoning steps to organize knowledge of the semantic meanings in computer systems. An integrated AI approach reconciles deep learning with symbolic AI to simulate human intelligence.

This sixth edition of the roundtable will unite AI pioneers, implementers, as well as experts from academia, to explore the frontier using both deep learning and symbolic AI to solve business problems in a reliable manner. Read this newsletter for details.

Note: To help participants better prepare for the in-person roundtable on October 28, we will offer an online (live) tutorial one week before the round table, on October 21 from 12:30 pm to 2 pm Eastern Time. This tutorial will cover fundamental concepts about deep learning and symbolic AI.

Topics to be discussed:

  • Integrated AI: Implementations and Future Directions
  • Intelligent Quality Control and Human Intervention
  • Deep Learning and Multilingual Content: Enterprise-level Applications
  • AI beyond LLMs
  • Identifying Ethical AI Tools as Part of Procurement

By joining this round table, you will:

  • Develop your own understanding of integrated AI
  • Understand the applications of AI other than LLMs, such as knowledge graphs, taxonomies and alike
  • Gather insights to apply and manage AI at the enterprise level
  • Implement solutions driven by deep learning in real life business scenarios
  • Discuss industry best practices to manage people and AI technologies
  • Learn about future directions in the AI space
  • Make valuable connections with industry peers

This round table is for:

  • Decision-makers who aim to leverage AI on both strategic and operational levels
  • Buyers who want to implement multilingual AI
  • Project Managers tasked with implementing an MT/AI solution
  • Vendors who want to leverage MT/AI to meet their clients’ needs
  • IT professionals involved in MT/AI implementation
  • Content Managers responsible for global content

Roundtable moderator/organizer:

Peng Wang, The Localization Institute

Advisory board members:

  1. Olga Beregovaya, Smartling
  2. Alon Lavie, Phrase/CMU
  3. Georg Kirchner, Dell

Speakers:

  1. Dr. Rachel Herwartz, TermSolutions GmbH
  2. Tom Bridges, CEO of CaptionHubs
  3. Dr. Pete Smith, Chief Data Analyst, University of Texas at Arlington
  4. Sheriff Mohammed Issaka, Founder & AI Research Lead, African Languages Lab (All Lab)
  5. Erik Vogt, Founder, Vogt Strategy

Location:

Marriott Hotel (Monterey)
350 Calle Principal, Monterey, CA 93940, USA
https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/mryca-monterey-marriott/overview/

Online Tutorial for roundtable participants

Title: Deep Neural-Symbolic Learning: An Enterprise-Level Localization Implementation Framework
Speaker: Sheriff Issaka (Computer science, UCLA)

Date/time: October 21 from 12:30 pm to 2 pm Eastern Time (live event)

Roundtable morning session

  • Time: 9am-12pm, including one coffee break (30 minutes)
  • Format: in-person discussions, use cases, and interactive business game
  • RAG: The intersection of symbolic AI and deep learning
  • Modules:
    • Module 1: State of the art overview and envision
    • Module 2: Intelligent Quality Control and Human Intervention

Lunch break

Roundtable afternoon session

  • Time: 1:30 – 5 pm, including one coffee break (30 minutes)
  • Format: in-person discussions, use cases, and interactive business game
  • Solution Corner
  • Modules:
    • Workshop: Optimizing linguistic assets for machine learning
    • Module 3: Augmenting LLM performance with human knowledge
    • Module 4: AI governance

minimum number of attendees: 12
maximum number: 24

Please note: The Round Table’s success depends on people being willing to share information and experiences freely. To encourage that, we ask the attendees not to record or republish the session. No formal minutes or records are kept, but attendees are free to keep their own notes

Dr. Peng Wang has taught, researched and practiced translation and localization on three continents. She is the convener for EDUinLOC, the chair of the automation/AI track for LocWorld conferences and a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. Previously, she was the CAT Tools Coordinator at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Wang has rich research experience on NLP AI, having worked as a linguistic researcher at the Corpus Research Lab at Northern Arizona University, a domain expert for data mining projects at the University of Maryland and an honorary research fellow on automatic discourse analysis tools at the University of Liverpool. Her current research and practice focus on human learning vs. machine learning, machine translation, terminology and multilingual corpus analysis.

Dr. Wang has published about 30 articles and two books. She is an expert in approaching technology in the context of culture and humanities. She embraces linguistic and cultural diversity in her classrooms, with students aged from 18 to over 70, in over 10 language combinations, coming from UAE, China, Italy, Spain, Germany, Morocco, Colombia, Mexico, and Haiti, to name just a few.

Localization Institute Global ToolBox – Malmö 2023

Localization Institute Global ToolBox – Malmö 2023

Olga Beregovaya – Vice President of AI and Machine Translation – Smartling. Olga Beregovaya has over 20 years of experience in Language Technology, NLP, Machine Learning, Global Content Transformation and AI Data development and is passionate about growing businesses through driving change and innovation. Olga started her career in language technology building lexicons and rules for Rule-based machine translation, gradually expanding her expertise into other broader applications of NLP and Machine Learning to enterprise translation workflows. Olga has also served as President of AMTA, currently serves as a Board member of Women in Localization and as an Advisor for Engineering Leadership at California State University, Chico. Olga received her MA, Linguistics/Germanic Studies at UC- Berkeley and MA/BA in Linguistics from St. Petersburg State University.

Localization Institute Global ToolBox – Malmö 2023

Alon Lavie is the VP of AI Research at Phrase, where he leads the development of the company’s AI strategy and manages its AI research team in Pittsburgh and Prague. Concurrently, Alon is an adjunct Consulting Professor at the Language Technologies Institute at CMU, where he has been a member of the faculty for 26 years. Prior to joining Phrase, he was the VP of Language Technologies at Unbabel. Prior to Unbabel, Alon was a senior manager at Amazon, where he led and managed the Amazon Machine Translation R&D group in Pittsburgh. Prior to that, Alon was the co-founder, President and CTO of “Safaba Translation Solutions”, an enterprise MT solutions technology startup, acquired by Amazon. Alon is a well-known expert in MT and translation evaluation, and spearheaded the development of the METEOR and COMET metrics. Other research interests and activities include MT adaptation approaches with and without human feedback, translation Quality Estimation, and methods for multi-engine MT system combination.

Alon served as the President of the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) (2013-2015). Prior to that, he was president of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) (2008-2012), and was General Chair of the AMTA 2010 and 2012 conferences. He is also a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), where he was president of SIGParse – ACL’s special interest group on parsing (2008-2013). In August 2021, at the 18th biennial Machine Translation Summit conference, Alon was honored to be awarded with the 2021 Makoto Nagao IAMT Award of Honour for his contributions to the field of Machine Translation.

Connect with Alon on LinkedIn.

Georg Kirchner – Machine Translation Program Manager – Dell. Georg Kirchner oversees the Machine Translation program at Dell Technologies. In this capacity, he assists both end users and translators from within the Global Translation Team, a shared services organization. Before shifting his focus to Machine Translation and related machine learning technologies, Georg was responsible for Translation Management Systems. Georg started his localization career in production, spending 17 years in various roles, including staff translator, project & program manager, and PMO lead.


Rachel Herwartz – Owner and Founder – TermSolutions GmbH. Rachel Herwartz is professor of translation and terminology management at the International University SDI Munich and head of the master’s program in Translation Management. Her research focuses on terminology, artificial intelligence, machine translation and large language models.

As owner and founder of TermSolutions GmbH, she is an expert in termbase modeling and the implementation and optimization of corporate terminology processes. She has been coaching and designing terminology management systems for 20 years and, as product owner, is responsible for the development of termXplorer, myTerm and termXact.

As a member of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), she is currently working on the new standard for multilingual terminology work.

Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn.

Tom Bridges – Founder & CEO – CaptionHub. Tom Bridges is the CEO and founder of CaptionHub, the platform for multimedia localization at scale. Prior to CaptionHub, he founded and led multiple post-production and motion graphics studios in London.

Pete Smith – Chief Analytics and Data Officer – University of Texas at Arlington. Pete Smith is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he also holds the AP Endowed Chair in Online Learning and Innovation.

He oversees UTA’s Localization and Translation undergraduate program (major, minor, and certificate levels), offered to students of seven languages as an introduction to language- and culture-centric careers today and for the future.

Pete is the co-author of The Community of Inquiry Framework in Contemporary Education: Emerging Research and Opportunities (Information Science Reference, 2018) and the forthcoming Multilingual and Multicultural AI (Routledge, 2025, with Peng Wang), in addition to numerous research and scholarly publications, presentations, and professional workshops.

Additionally, Pete serves as the Chief Analytics and Data Officer for UTA, overseeing University Analytics, which engages more than 25 data scientists toward achieving the strategic academic and business goals of the university.

Sheriff Issaka – Founder & AI Research Lead – African Languages Lab (All Lab). Sheriff Issaka is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducts state-of-the-art research at the Misinformation, AI & Responsible Society (MARS) Lab. His work focuses on critical areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including bias and fairness, low-resource languages, and multimodal models for enhanced language understanding.

Also, as founder and lead researcher of the African Languages Lab (All Lab), Sheriff spearheads a global collaborative project that is revolutionizing NLP for African languages. This initiative creates comprehensive roadmaps, innovative methodologies, and open-source resources to democratize AI for underrepresented languages, addressing a critical gap in current language technologies.

Before embarking on his doctoral studies, Sheriff applied his expertise as a data scientist at the Zafar and ICU Data Science Labs. There, he developed cutting-edge predictive models for pancreatic cancer detection and pioneered NLP techniques for HIV phenotyping, demonstrating the powerful real-world applications of AI in healthcare.

Sheriff’s research is driven by a profound commitment to leveraging AI for social impact, with a particular focus on underserved communities. His work aims to enhance the cultural competence of AI systems, improve the accessibility of advanced technologies across diverse populations, and address ethical challenges in AI deployment to ensure that the benefits of AI and NLP are accessible to all, regardless of language or cultural background.

Erik Vogt – Founder – Vogt Strategy. With over two decades of rich experience in the language services industry, Erik’s career has been marked by a deep engagement in operations, solution design, and sales leadership, ranging from grassroots to senior executive roles. Erik’s passion is striving for a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies involved in globalizing and localizing content, products, and services across a spectrum of domains and markets is backed by adeptness in steering large international and interdisciplinary teams.

Erik has a passionate commitment to building and leading teams that excel in deploying complex solutions. His core competencies lie in pre-sales consulting, program management, process optimization, and global team management and is invigorated by the challenge of bridging multiple disciplines to develop impactful solutions, meticulously tailoring each project to its unique requirements, and fostering an environment where team members can realize their full potential.

Erik also has a dedication to continuous learning and innovation as evident through an MBA, MSML, AI certifications, and a personal commitment to dedicating 6-8 hours each week to learning. His ultimate mission is to empower customers and partners to actualize their ambitions and visions, aligning processes to achieve optimal outcomes. His deepest gratification comes from seeing satisfied customers, the growth and success of the teams he works with, and the synergy of well-coordinated team efforts.

TermClub: Getting your Corporate Language into LLMs

October 28 from 9:00am – 5:00pm

Registration Fee: $750 – full day price (lunch included).

Your registration for this session includes lunch

10% discount for 3 or more students from the same company – please contact jill@localizationinstitute.com for more information.

Generative AI has become omnipresent in corporate projects and strategies. And for many use cases, terminology, taxonomy, and structured knowledge are important as a foundation for productive use. But what does that mean for terminology management in a corporate language department?

This hands-on workshop lets you look under the hood of AI by directly engaging with AI on a deeper level than using ready-made applications like ChatGPT. This helps you understand how AI “works”, how we can influence and shape the output, and particularly how we can get your terminology and other knowledge “into” the content generated (or translated) by AI.

Localization teams are sitting on a wealth of data which can be very valuable for content-related use cases in your entire organization. And as a “language person”, you can help the AI teams in your company benefit from your data and knowledge. But you will need to collaborate with colleagues in IT and other divisions when you want to connect your terminology to the AI technologies that are being put into place. In our workshop, we will try to “translate” what your colleagues in IT and other divisions are asking from you: What is an API, what does an API call return, what is RAG, and how can I connect all this?

Let´s make sure your valuable linguistic data can be put to full use by enabling you to fully join the conversation. Let’s ride the wave of AI!

By joining this workshop, you will:

  • Understand how LLMs and their base technologies work
  • Understand what you can do to tweak and steer the AI output
  • Understand RAG is its ability to provide more contextually relevant responses
  • Understand APIs and how to work with them
  • Understand questions and requirements from your IT and other divisions
  • Dive into your own use cases or our sandbox use cases where terminologies, taxonomies, and knowledge graphs come into play with GenAI
  • Build a few simple assistants in the OpenAI platform that access and process input from terminologies (using APIs or not)
  • Work on fine-tuning models with corporate data like terminologies, TMs, and even just multilingual documents

Attendee Experience: Everyone.

Target Audience: Terminology or localization aficionados wanting to learn about AI and how corporate AI programs can benefit from their terminology.

Session Organizer: Klaus Fleischmann – Kaleidoscope

Host: Klaus Fleischmann – Kaleidoscope

Speakers:

  1. Christian Lang, Kaleidoscope
  2. Barbara Inge Karsch, BIK Terminology

minimum number of attendees: 5
maximum number: 15

Location:

Marriott Hotel (Monterey)
350 Calle Principal, Monterey, CA 93940, USA
https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/mryca-monterey-marriott/overview/

Klaus Fleischmann – Founder and CEO – Kaleidoscope. Klaus studied translation, conference interpretation and technical communication in Austria and California. In 1996, he founded Kaleidoscope, a language technology company, and is also CEO of Eurocom Translation Services, a translation company. Klaus served on the GALA Board of Directors for 4 year and is currently on the board of Termnet and ELIA. He also speaks regularly at conferences, universities and events about such exciting topics like terminology, the global process management or linguistic quality management. In is private life, Klaus is an outdoor enthusiast and prefers to hike or climb a rainy mountain to relaxing on a sunny beach. If there is time left, Klaus likes to play the electric guitar or Saxophone.
Connect with Klaus on LinkedIn.

Christian Lang – Technical Consultant – Kaleidoscope. Christian Lang has a wide range of experience and interests in the field of languages, as demonstrated by his studies in Japanese and translation. His initial involvement with terminology management was as a freelance translator for the European Patent Office. It has since become one of his areas of expertise, as has research in the field of NLP on topics such as machine translation, automatic term extraction, and concept maps.
Connect with Christian on LinkedIn.

Barbara Inge Karsch – Owner  – BIK Terminology. Barbara Inge Karsch is the owner of BIK Terminology, a terminology consultancy and training company based on Washington State. Since 2010, she has focused on terminology training, terminology development and the implementation of terminology management systems as a consultant, but draws on her many years in house at J.D. Edwards and Microsoft. As Adjunct Associate Professor in the Master’s program at NYU, Barbara teaches terminology management as well as translation of scientific material. Barbara has recently been appointed convenor to ISO 12616-2, Terminology Workflows for Large Organizations. In her spare time, she is a puppy raiser for Summit Assistance Dogs.
Connect with Barbara on LinkedIn.

Half Day Sessions – No Lunch Included
Special Half Day Session
Discount for LocWorld Attendees

Global Strategy Playbook Workshop

October 28 from 1:30pm – 5:00pm

Registration Fee: $125 if you are registered for both days of LocWorld52, $250 if you are not. Please contact jill@localizationinstitute.com for your discount code if you are registered for both days.

This session has a catered break, but lunch is not included with this session.

Have you wondered how to convince your management that your globalization or localization function contributes strategic value to the company? Maybe you’re a localization manager on the buyer side, executing more and more productively as you adopt better tools and processes. But still, you’re seen as a mere service in your organization, rather than as a strategic partner? How can you change that perception? Well, there’s a (free) book on the subject, written by a group of successful industry managers, directors, and vice presidents who have met and overcome this challenge.

We are offering a workshop with several of the authors to discuss key topics from the book.

  • What does it mean to adopt a strategic approach to localization?
  • We’re all supposed to be data driven now. But what data? How to get it? How to analyze it and develop appropriate plans?
  • Technology continues to evolve at what sometimes seems an alarming pace. You may need a structure to help you evaluate the many possibilities.
  • We have multiple stakeholders at different levels of importance and influence. How should we categorize and act on those relationships?

Attendees from both the buyer and provider sides of the industry are welcome, since the lessons from the playbook are relevant to anyone managing the many facets of localization.

One of the authors will outline a case study from the book and launch a general discussion based on specific, related questions, enlivened by the experience of the group. We plan to touch on three or four of the chapters in the book in this workshop.

Authors:

  • Karen Combe, Former Vice President of Localization at PTC
  • Melissa Biggs, Partner/Co-Founder at Locale Solutions
  • Mimi Hills, Principal at Hillstra Associates

To download A Globalization Strategy Playbook: go to Githubhttps://github.com/GILT-Forum/Globalization-Strategy-Playbook/releases/tag/1.0

Format: Workshop

Location:

Middlebury Institute of International Studies
460 Pierce Street
Monterey, CA

Please note:

Maximum number of attendees: 48

Karen Combe. Karen recently retired from her position as Vice President of Localization at PTC, where she was responsible for product localization as well as for localization support for PTCU, Technical Support, and Marketing. She has been a member of the GILT Leaders Forum, a community of peers in the localization industry, since its inception. In 2022, Karen contributed as an expert from the GILT Leaders Forum and as a co-author of “The Globalization Strategy Playbook”.

Previously, Karen was Senior Vice President at International Language Engineering, where she managed Client Services, Sales and Marketing. Karen holds a B.A in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley and a post-graduate degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She served in the Peace Corps in Senegal and in International Voluntary Services in Algeria.

In addition, Karen worked for 8 years on a ranch in northwestern Colorado training horses and looking after a large herd of cattle.

Melissa Biggs – Founding Partner – Locale Solutions LLC. Melissa Biggs is a localization veteran with over 25 years of experience in management roles targeting localized products for enterprises. Her career focuses on technical content and localization leadership. Her enthusiasm for localization started at Olivetti Corporation in Italy. Melissa then led a technical publications group at Xerox for artificial intelligence products. She switched fields to focus on globalization strategy at Sun Microsystems, managing localization groups, as well as leading corporate initiatives for global products, and international technology strategies. At Oracle, she contributed to Oracle’s translation products and processes. Melissa also managed marketing localization at Informatica, a data integration company.

In addition to deep corporate localization engagements, Melissa is active in industry and non-profit groups. She has served on localization industry-wide groups, including as charter member of GILT Leaders ForumTAUS (Translation Automation User Society) and Localization World. In 2022, Melissa contributed as an expert from the GILT Leaders Forum and as a co-author of “The Globalization Strategy Playbook”. She is on the board of the non-profit Global Lives Project, which teaches global empathy through global film and curriculums, and is a mentor for the international TechWomen program.

Her passion is promoting best practices to connect global users with localized product experiences and information.

Currently, as a founding partner with Locale Solutions LLC, she provides localization strategy consulting services for companies in technology. Melissa graduated from Bucknell University and completed communications graduate studies at San Jose State University.  In her copious free time, she loves travel (virtual for now), a good read, anything film (film festivals, streaming, etc.), and swimming.

Mimi Hills – Principal – Hillstra Associates. Mimi Hills is a localization industry veteran. She’s the former Director, Global Information Experience at VMware, Inc. and has also led globalization teams at BlackBerry and Sun Microsystems. She comes from the software world with a background in project and engineering management. She’s passionate about people and finding ways to communicate. Early in her career she worked in college science textbook industry, as well as in technical publications at Apple Computer.

Mimi is active in the localization industry and in diversity and inclusion circles, and is a passionate advocate for the non-English speaking user. Mimi has been a mentor and Impact Coach for over ten years with the TechWomen program, and has traveled to Africa three times with delegation trips. In 2022, Mimi contributed as an expert from the GILT Leaders Forum and as a co-author of “The Globalization Strategy Playbook”.

In her spare time, she plays guitar and bass and runs a nonprofit music camp for adults.

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